The importance of being called Trello: Productivity worth millions of dollars

If you remember, yesterday we talked about the sale of 425 million dollars from Trello, a webapp productivity – oriented functioning as a board on which users post tasks to organize from their everyday life, matters that have to do with his daily work. The buyer was Atlassian, which manages projects like HipChat, a conversation client for work teams similar to Slack with a lot of pull in corporate environments.

In any case, the Trello name may not mean the same thing to all users. That is why we have thought that it is worth explaining exactly what it is exactly, where it comes from and what has meant its irruption in the world of productivity, where he has sat chair.

But before we talk about anything else, let’s start the story from the beginning. Trello performed at a TechCrunch event in 2011, quickly gaining favor with such publications as Wired or Lifehacker in the process. Since its introduction its user base has not stopped growing, and currently has one million active users per month and 19 million registered users.

How does Trello work?

Basically, Trello works like a board where items lists are hung. These items can range from things to remember, to tasks that we have to complete, or to anything we have to do in a day. In a sense it is comparable to applications like Todoist or Wunderlist, but with an extended functionality.

The tasks that we hang on each board are shown in the form of cards. To these cards we can add images, labels, links and even Office files or PDFs as attachments to each one, if necessary. Labels are especially useful because they help you to distinguish at a glance the scope of each task thanks to its color coding.

In a sense your workflow has to do with the Getting Things Done or GTD method : Trello tries to clear our mind by making us think about what our current job is and trying to tackle one task at a time, so that we can concentrate on finishing one Thing before moving on to the next.

When it comes to a collaborative dashboard for, for example, drawing up a work project, it is possible to assign a project member to each card, so that the functions of each are much clearer. So everyone knows what they have to deal with, and nobody gets lost.

In addition to this, you can enable integration with different Internet services(the so – called Trello power-ups ) such as Dropbox, Google Drive, GitHub, Slack or Twitter. This is especially useful in collaborative projects, since you can better keep track of the tasks that are created, who is assigned them or the files that are shared between users. It even allows adding cards through emails if we set the board for it.

It is worth noting that using the basic service and registering is completely free, although there are some payment functions that have to do with board customization issues. We talk about custom backgrounds, stickers packages for cards and so on, so many users with the free version have more than enough.

Why Trello is worth millions?

At the beginning of the article we commented that Atlassian company had bought Trello for 425 million dollars. We must not forget that the company behind this productivity tool is a small startup, but still managed to have a devout user base that has made it grow.

Atlassian’s main business model is to create software that helps programmers create other software. They also have their own project management tool, and yet Trello inspires the same kind of devotion as applications like Instagram or Pinterest despite being professionally oriented.

This means that those who use it do so because they want, not because someone has sold it to the company for which productivity software works through an exclusive contract. In Atlassian they admire this type of success, and know that it is very difficult to replicate.

While $ 425 million may seem like a barbarity when it comes to buying a small startup, analysts expect its market value to reach $ 28 billion by 2020. In words by Melissa Incera, an analyst at 451 Research …

The price could have risen significantly in the years to come, especially if the company maintains the growth rate they have had so far.

Keep in mind that Trello competes from you to you with other applications that serve the same purposes, as the not less famous Asana. The two are practically the same, they serve almost the same thing, but Trello ends up being the users favorite for its user-friendly interface. Asana, despite being another great application, has a somewhat higher learning curve than not everyone wants to take on.

At the moment more than 19 million people use Trello, but in August of 2014 the platform counted on 4.5 million users according to the own company. That rapid growth rate is what attracts the attention of investors.

Atlassian’s Business Lineup

With its latest acquisition, Atlassian has not only bought the company, but the product and equipment that has developed it for a much smaller amount than if it waited a couple of years more. Seeing what’s going on with Trello, it’s certainly been a smart move.

The company, by the way, will continue to offer Trello as an independent service. Everything will be more or less the same as always, but with the caveat that the Atlassian team is now also composed of the group of people responsible for the productivity tool, or that is what the cofounder of buyers in your corporate blog.

So it seems they are going to let Trello go his own way despite being under his umbrella, which is still good news. After all, why change something that already works well?

With the addition of the personal organization tool, the company’s product lineup is in 13 products, among which we highlight two: JIRA and HipChat. For those who do not know them, JIRA is a project management tool similar to Trello and HipChat is the direct competition of Slack. Or what is the same, talks between working groups.

JIRA will continue to function as a standalone GTD tool without interfering with Trello, while HipChat will continue to compete with Slack. For now the latter is the preferred of users , but taking into account that the Atlassian product is no longer restricted to payment users for a few years, competition for corporate messaging will surely gain in strength and crudeness.

A third product that we can highlight as “star” of this company is the BitBucket repository, which competes directly with GitHub. The support for Mercurial makes it a better choice than GitHub for those who still use it, since in the open source repository it is more difficult to implement. Now, BitBucket offers payment plans to access more features, while GitHub offers everything for free. And yet, devs have valid arguments in favor of one and the other.